Michael Francis Tompsett

Michael Francis Tompsett is a British-born physicist, engineer, and inventor, and the founder director of the US software company TheraManager. He is a former researcher at the English Electric Valve Company, who later moved to Bell Labs in the United States. Tompsett designed and built the first ever video camera with a solid-state (CCD) sensor. Tompsett received the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2017, with Eric Fossum, George Smith and Nobukazu Teranishi. Dr. Tompsett has also received two other lifetime awards; the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame 2010 Pioneer Award, and the 2012 IEEE Edison Medal. The thermal-imaging camera tube developed from his invention also earned a Queen's Award in 1987.

Dr. Tompsett is known particularly for his work on infrared imagers and CCD imagers. He pioneered compact, low power, high performance and low cost solid-state infrared imagers, CCD imagers and digital cameras and made contributions in several fields with patents and publications over an extended period of time. He is credited with applying the principle behind the charge-coupled device to invent the CCD imager, used in devices such as digital cameras.

He studied physics at the University of Cambridge and also completed an engineering PhD there (1962–66).

Dr. Tompsett built a reflection high-energy electron diffraction (RHEED) system to study surfaces. While at English Electric Valve(EEV), he built the first ultra-high-vacuum RHEED system with in-situ deposition to study the structures of thin-films of lead oxide as they were deposited. This understanding was needed to make Plumbicon television camera-tubes. He consulted with VacGen (now VG Scienta) to make a commercial system, the first of which was sold to IBM Labs.

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